Well, it does now seem that I and others have been
repeating a corruption of Francis Bacon's "horse's
mouth." Bacon was fond of parables about rationalist
spiders and empiricist pissmires [ants] and industrious
bees and so on, so I'd guess he invented his horse as
well. Here follows another instructive equine fable that
you might like -- this one repeated from Michael
Wertheimer, who ought to have known. I think this
one is about false precision or about the perfect making
nonsense of the merely good, or something like that.
-David
Max Wertheimer related this story:
A school inspector, very impressed with the children he was questioning, asked,
with a twinkle in his eye, "how many hairs has a horse?"
Immediately, a small hand went up. "Sir," said the child, "a horse has
3,582,631 hairs."
Astonished, the inspector said, "but how do you know that?"
"Well, sir," said the child, "if you do not believe me, count them yourself."
The inspector laughed over the incident with the schoolteacher, and said, "I
must tell my colleagues when I return to Vienna."
The next year, when the inspector again visited the school, the teacher asked
if the inspector's colleagues had enjoyed the story.
"I could not tell them," said the school inspector, "because I couldn't for the
life of me remember the number of hairs that the child said."
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David G. Likely, Department of Psychology,
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, N. B., E3B 5A3 Canada
History of Psychology:
http://www.unb.ca/web/psychology/likely/psyc4053.htm
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